Re: [orca-list] Feature request: Orca should support Aria-Hidden

[Mallory van Achterberg <stommepoes stommepoes nl>]

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 10:02:12PM +0100, Eric Scheibler wrote:
> All right, following situation:
> On my blog I use a plugin to display code. The code is ordered in a table with two columns and one
> row. The left column holds the line numbers and the right one is for the code lines. The reason for
> this is, that you can copy the code without the line numbers. But now Orca reads all line numbers
> first and then the whole code block. Cause this is annoying I've contacted the developer and he
> suggested to use aria-hidden. So Orca would jump over the row with the line numbers and reads
> the code block directly.
>
> In this blog posting you can see an example, it's at the end of the posting:
> http://www.eric-scheibler.de/testblog/blog/2012/12/16/luftersteuerung-des-thinkpad-x200/
>
> Regards
> Eric

It would be a bit of a dangerous assumption that users don't know how
to use their own software to deal with tables, provided the table is
properly marked up (another markup possibility is a definition list,
if you agree with the W3C that DL's could be semantic for key-value
pairs). That is, users may come across all sorts of tables, and most
screen readers offer ways of navigating through them.

Suppose someone makes a comment on the blog about "line number x"? 
Now the screen reader user, if completely blind, cannot check which line
the commenter means. You would get similar results if you used an image
representing the left column.

aria-hidden is, so far as I know, the aria-role assigned to elements with
the new HTML5 'hidden' attribute, which also has a dubious use case (and
it wouldn't surprise me if it didn't get removed from the spec entirely...
plus, the two work completely different despite having similar names).

I think it's good that you provided an example page. Regular Orca users
can give you better feedback.

cheers,
Mallory